"Get out." Desmond turned back around to sit properly. "Get out while you still can. Before you know it, you'll be doing everything he asks, and even that won't be enough."

Skulduggery nodded. "I seem to be doing that already."

"Stephanie," Desmond added as an afterthought, "don't worry. You'll understand what we're talking about when you're a little older."

"Sure, Dad." Stephanie had settled down so that she was almost using her mother as a big and squishy pillow. "I'm doing my best not to listen anyway."

That was good. She was fifteen years old. Des hadn't even wanted her to have a boyfriend until she was out of high school at the very least. Unfortunately, that ship had sailed, towards a surprisingly polite young man with ridiculous hair. A surprisingly polite young man with ridiculous hair who, moreover, was a sorcerer.

Sorcerers. Desmond shook his head. Sorcerers and magic. People in the world who were over 800 years old, people in the world who could control fire, people in the world who didn't think twice about a living skeleton. Or... well, maybe not that last part. Skulduggery said he was the only one, and Gabe said Skulduggery was unusual even for sorcerers.

And Stephanie had somehow found her way into the middle of it all.

Desmond was, in a way, struggling with that even harder than Melissa was. Because he knew exactly what it was like to want magic to be real, and he could understand why Stephanie hid it from them. He could even, if he tried, understand why she outright lied to them for so long.

He couldn't understand why she left them with nothing more than a reflection. How she could justify that to herself, let alone to other people. How other people didn't try to stop her. How many times did they talk to Gordon's reflection, rather than Gordon himself?

"Why didn't Gordon tell us?" he found himself asking the only person who would ever be able to answer.

"Gordon didn't know," said Skulduggery. "I didn't meet Stephanie until after he was dead."

"No. Not about Stephanie. About any of it."

The skeleton detective didn't answer for a bit, leaving the hum of the engine the only thing to break the silence. Desmond was beginning to think he wouldn't, until finally the not-skeleton's head tilted to the side. "I asked him that once. He used to say it was because he'd made a promise to your father to let you and Fergus grow up normally, but I don't think he'd have told you even if he had carte blanche. The magical community tends to be a secretive bunch, but it also tends to be dangerous, and Gordon didn't want to be the reason any of you stumbled into it."

"But he was. Wasn't he? Would Stephanie have done any of this if he hadn't died?"

"Probably not."

"Then why didn't he tell us? I understand not being able to plan for heart attacks, but if he knew something could go wrong, why didn't he let us help him?"

"Because letting you help him would have put you all in direct danger. No one could have predicted his heart attack, least of all him. No one could have predicted that the circumstances surrounding it would catch Stephanie."

Desmond caught Stephanie's eye over his shoulder. "And would Gordon have wanted you to keep lying to us for so long?"

"I don't know," she murmured. "It's not like I can ask him."

"Why not? You people have magic. You can't talk to ghosts?"

Stephanie smiled. "Not really."

A horrible thought occurred to Des just then, making his hands clench in his lap and his shoulders tense. "Was it really a heart attack?"

Stephanie looked steadily back at him with a gaze that caught him slightly off-guard, it was so... grown-up. Calm, and mature. "Do you really want us to answer that?"

Desmond considered. "No," he decided. "No. Not yet." A different horrible thought occurred to him instead, but since this one was slightly more mundane, he clung onto it. "Stephanie, how old is Fletcher?"

"Um - "

"Because if he's already over a century old, I'm putting my foot down."